08/25/2026
😴 MWU Mental Health Minute | Week 2: Sleep & Your Brain
📚 Studying longer isn’t always learning better.
When the workload piles up, sleep can start to feel negotiable. Just one more chapter. One more lecture. One more hour…
But your brain is doing important work while you sleep.
🔬 Research → Real Life
A 2024 meta-analysis examining 125 effects from 39 reports and 1,234 participants found that restricting sleep to 3–6.5 hours was associated with poorer memory formation compared with normal sleep.
In other words: cutting sleep to create more study time may come at a cost to the very learning you’re trying to accomplish.
💡 Try this:
Instead of treating sleep as what happens after everything else gets done, make it part of your study plan. Set a stopping time, protect a wind-down period, and give your brain time to consolidate what you learned.
And if stress, anxiety, racing thoughts, or an overwhelming workload are regularly interfering with your sleep, you don’t have to figure it out alone.
💙 MWU Student Counseling Services
Confidential support is available to MWU students.
📧 [email protected]
Research Spotlight:
Crowley, R., Alderman, E., Javadi, A.-H., & Tamminen, J. (2024). A systematic and meta-analytic review of the impact of sleep restriction on memory formation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 167, 105929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105929
Educational information only; not a substitute for professional care.
